Spotlight

Intel has released microcode patches to address the Spectre vulnerability on additional families of CPUs. Meanwhile, researchers have found a new way of implementing the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, but the variants are covered by existing patches. “We have now released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Coffee..Read more

An annual report on the state of cybersecurity released Feb. 21 by Cisco Systems suggests cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated and devious in their attacks to compromise IT environments. Based on a survey of 3,600 chief security officers (CSOs) and security operations (SecOps) managers from 26 countries, the report finds the volume of instances in..Read more

On Feb. 16, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. returned an indictment against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies for a scheme involving information warfare against the political institutions of the United States. Does this portend a new strategy for dealing with cyberthreats or is this merely political theater? The answer, of course,..Read more

The number of software vulnerabilities recorded last year grew by 31 percent compared to 2016 and one-third of them have public exploits, according to a new report. Vulnerability intelligence firm Risk Based Security, which maintains its own vulnerability database called VulnDB, recorded a total of 20,832 security flaws last year. Around 7,900 of those flaws..Read more

There is no denying the intellectual property (IP) of U.S. companies is flying out of the country. It doesn’t matter the sector; if your IP is of use to another, there is a likelihood that someone somewhere is targeting it. Recognizing this is a problem to the economic livelihood of the economy, the U.S. government..Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Feb.16 that a Federal grand jury dropped the hammer on a gaggle of Russian citizens and three Russian entities for their hand in the meddling in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. This Russian intelligence effort, code-named “Project Lakhta,” was conducted from 2014 to 2016 and is an..Read more

More than 119,000 scanned identity documents, including passports and drivers’ licenses, belonging to people from the United States and abroad were exposed in an insecure Amazon S3 storage bucket. The storage bucket belonged to a company called Bongo International that provided services for cross-border transactions between U.S.-based online merchants and international customers, complete with anti-fraud..Read more

Meet Amélie Koran, deputy CIO for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General, and one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming InfoSec World 2018 March 19-21 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Her March 19 keynote address, “Are We There Yet? Getting There is Only Half the Trip,” highlights some..Read more

Microsoft released patches for 50 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Outlook, Edge and Internet Explorer, 14 of which are rated critical. The company also released additional protections for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities for older 32-bit versions of Windows 10, including Windows 10 for HoloLens. The most urgent patch is for a critical flaw (CVE-2018-0825)..Read more

The Waymo intellectual property theft suit against Uber came to a screeching halt last week, just days into the jury trial to determine whether Uber had stolen Waymo’s technology. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi expressed his “regret” for what had taken place and directed his team to settle. Waymo was to provide .034 percent of Uber,..Read more